From nothing to self sufficient

living the wild life

A very good friend came to visit us today! I love having visitors. She was actually our midwife for the birth of the three youngest children. She came to check on the new baby but made sure to set aside some time to check out the farm.

We showed her the chickens, both the hens and the meat birds. We then all piled into the explorer and headed down to the farm. We did an entire off road tour going around the boarder. C had pointed out a massive grouping of blackberry briars up at the top of the field so i was trying to see if we would have any fruit, but the field had been mowed last year and all we had were first year shoots. It was a bit disappointing, but i was still looking along the outer edge of the property to make sure i hadn’t missed any. We were finishing the tour and were coming back up the field when we spied a bunch of color. I pulled over and to my surprise we had berries all over! I started picking but they didn’t look like blackberries to me, and they were still too early. I took a picture and sent it to C.To my surprise he sent back that we had black raspberries!!! I was so excited. raspberries are by far my favorite berry. I grabbed a container and started picking. I was not at all prepared to be walking through raspberry briars but that didn’t stop me. My legs are all cut up now but it was completely worth it to be able to enjoy about 1-2 small containers that you buy at the stores worth of raspberries. I cant wait to go out in the next few days and pick some more. I would like to make at least 1-2 small jars of jam and maybe a pie or two. we would like to have a larger patch than we currently have so i may try and take a few cuttings to grow and plant more for next year. I would love for us to have a fairly large crop of raspberries and blackberries next year. YAY!!

It was also really nice to see our friend J teaching our oldest daughter G about some of the other plants we have. They were pulling wild onions and garlic, and they pulled a wild carrot (but nobody is going to eat it because none of us knew enough about then to tell if it was a poisonous one or not). We visited for all in all about 3 hours. it was really nice and really fun and resulted in some great wild food finds!!